Was C.S. Lewis a genius?
Oh, absolutely, there’s no doubt about that. He was a complete genius. He also was a very fast reader, but he had honed the talent and perfected the strange memory that resulted in never forgetting anything he had read. Now he could, he could ask you to pick any book off of his shelves, and you would pick a page and read him a line and he would quote the rest of the page; in fact, quote the rest of the book until you told him to stop. He had this enormous capacity to remember everything he’d ever read. A photographic memory? I’m not sure, photographic perhaps or phonographic, one or the other. It might have been the sounds that stayed with him, I just don’t know. I’d rather feel it would have been the sounds Because he enjoyed the sounds of words and the sounds of word structures. So I feel it was probably the sounds that stayed with him, and the meanings that stayed with him. But the result of this of course, was that he had read enormously widely, all the great classics of literature
